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MMO-Champion Giveaway - Swift Windsteed Mount - Day 1
It is time to do another belated holiday giveaway! This time we are starting with 5 x Swift Windsteed. Be sure to read the full rules below. Good luck!

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For Divine Storm, several years ago, we got on this kick that thou shalt not use AE in single target fights. Ret paladins (Divine Storm) and warriors (Whirlwind) were particularly affected (and perhaps bummed out by it). The game has changed a lot since that time and now we have cleaving Arcane Barrage and core abilities like Howling Blast. We think the Ret toolkit is in a better place with separate single-target and AE finishers, but we get requests all the time to make Divine Storm more prominent. This set bonus is one way to do that. We also saw some complaints about yet another set bonus affecting TV, and thought maybe we could play with DS. We also saw complaints that TV randomly doing more damage would be frustrating. The new bonus allows you to take advantage of a proc to increase your damage. We could change the proc to Holy damage, but we would have to nerf it to account for the 2pc and Inquisition.

For Blinding Light, we don't think it changes much that it's used at the end of a CC chain. It's still trickier to get off a cast time spell. You have to stop moving and risk interruption. Yes, you may use it defensively less often, but the net result will still be less being CC'd by a Holy paladin. No, the CC target can't stop the cast time, but we balance PvP around group play. During MoP development, we wanted to make sure paladins had more offensive pressure. Holy ended up getting plenty with higher nuke damage and access to Repentance. With the recent changes to shaman, Holy paladins are the most dominant healer in high-end PvP. We think this change along with the set piece bonus change will help bring that down a little.

Our current though on Solace is that it will provide damage and healing for both Disc and Holy. So Holy could use it for some Atonement-like healing, as could Disc, but Disc won't double dip and shouldn't feel like it's mandatory. That could change (all of this could change) as we try it out and iterate more.

Khendra, we have no objection to using Prayer of Healing when you need to heal a bunch of people. That's what it's for. But when you're using Prayer of Healing in Preparation for future damage because DA and SS make your AE heal better at shielding than actual Power Word: Shield, then that even further reduces your options. (In 10s, Disc tends to use Atonement more, so they're doing something more than just PoH spam. In 25s, we see some Atonement use, but it's fit in when possible and healers in 25s are just always going to be able to specialize more.)

We might in the future add another AE heal for Disc (I think you can make a compelling argument that in this day and age, healers need a variety of interesting AE heals and maybe only a couple of ST heals, while healer design for years went in the opposite direction) but that's not the sort of thing we want to drop on you in the middle of an expansion. In the meantime, if Disc uses Penance and PW:Shield some more (and Flash Heal in PvP) and doesn't trounce all the other healers, we will be satisfied and hopefully so will priests.

As previously mentioned, we chose 80% as the damage for Shuriken Toss, as that made it balanced with white attacks, to offset the Dual Wield miss penalty and glancing. However, that neglected to consider that it also triggers poisons more often due to not missing 19% of the time. So we’re lowering its damage slightly, to 75%. That’s intentionally under-compensating, so that the extra poison procs are still a gain, rather than just neutral. Additionally, to make absolutely clear that you do not want to run out, Shuriken Toss, and run back in, to get the Shuriken auto attacks, we’re making the auto attack override end when you get back in melee range.

We are changing the 4pc Frost / Unholy set bonus from Army of the Dead to Killing Machine and Sudden Doom proc more often. We don't have numbers yet and it's possible they won't work out. In addition to all the concerns mentioned, it was a really valid point that Army of the Dead is hard to use in Raid Finder, where most of our players experience raids. You rarely get countdowns before a pull and players in general are used to yelling at DKs who use Army because they had a bad experience at some point with the ghoul taunt.

For PvP, we're considering just making the Cyclone duration buff the bonus for all druid specs. We'd likely just give Feral cheaper interrupts (their current glove bonus) baseline.

Patch 5.1 Hotfixes - January 14

Originally Posted by Blizzard
(Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Creatures

Various Hozen rare spawns can now be slain appropriately.

Kor'kron Flak Cannons will now appropriately deal damage to Alliance players over Dominance Point. Attacking the cannon will no longer flag players for PvP.

Quests

Fixed an issue where some players were unable obtain the quest "The Bell Speaks" to progress in the Shieldwall quest chain. Achievement credit for "In Search of Harmony" will be corrected in a future patch.

Bug Fixes

Players will no longer sometimes become stuck in the Battle for Gilneas.

Blue Posts

Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment

Flying Mounts Feedback
We pretty firmly believe the questing experience is just wholly better when you can't lift off and set down wherever you like, frog leaping from quest objective to quest objective. Certainly we've supported that with no flying for the leveling content of Wrath and Mists, and only after you hit level cap can you obtain the ability to fly. The new zone coming in 5.2 is not unlike the Isle of Quel'Danas in a few ways, and one of them is that there's no flying. That helps us achieve that desire for progressive questing, it's good for supporting world PvP, as well as lets us make really difficult outdoor encounters, like Oondasta - who is OG Kazzak in difficulty - that you can't just drop on top of from the sky.

I can't imagine flying mounts ever going away, they're a big part of the game at this point, but certainly they can take a break when it makes sense and we can present content in a more intimate way from time to time. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Mists of Pandaria and Casual PlayersI prefer dedicating, let's say, one day to grind one faction, by doing dungeon runs, grinding mobs, maybe doing some dailies, and then be off with it (for example I blasted from friendly to exalted with Skettis in less than 2 days)
Have you considered the sole fact you can't do that is one of the reasons you've got something to do for longer rather than be done with everything in a single day and the complain for the next 3 weeks there's nothing to do?

This is a classic response. "We're reading what you're saying, but we're not listening because this is what we're doing and we don't care."
You're implying we should listen to all kinds of hyperboles. There's a BIG difference between feedback and hyperboles. If we based the feedback we passed to the devs on them (and for some reason our developers suddenly became individuals without any judgment capabilities) then the game would be in a real ugly place, to be honest.

It's fine if you don't like something. It's fine if you hate it with burning passion. It's not fine when you go on to ignore every other aspect of the game, reduce everything it offers to the absolute minimum, and then demand we act based on such a silly premise.

Can you honestly say you enjoy dailies? I sure as hell can't. Well, for a few days after I hit 90, they were refreshing and enjoyable. Thereafter they were a grind, a bore, an extremely poor design and a wasted effort.
I do. I enjoy them, I find them useful to do something outside my daily dungeon/raid routine. I've only stopped running them once I've hit exalted with all Pandaria factions to instead run scenarios, old raids and PVP.

Do you fear repute? Does your pride stop you from even attempting to admit that there's something even slightly wrong?
I'm noone to judge if there's something wrong with the amount of daily quests. I'm not a developer. I can understand, however, how a player might feel he's got to climb a huge mountain when you just reach level 90 and realize all the reputations you've got to go through.

But the thing is, now that all content is unlocked (unlike at MoP's launch), you can really progress at your leisure.

I'm sure many players, like myself, would be a lot more satisfied if we got a response that was understanding of our concerns and hatred for daily quests and acknowledged that we want an alternative.
There's plenty of alternative activities. The issue here, I fear, is that you want the rewards tied to daily quests without doing daily quests. I would like to have Heroic raiding gear rewards without doing Heroic raiding every day, but hey, I understand that wouldn't be healthy for the game.

Being an altoholic casual player my only complain about the dailies is that you have to them several times if you want to experience some casual end-game with a few alts.
Honest question: Isn't a better option for some casual end-game to run LFR with your alts? You'll get a shot at gear every week rather than having to go through those faction items.

Even if you are a paying customer they really dont care what you say about this topic, they think the solution to Cata problems are dailys times 25 a day.
Oh, please. The solution to Cataclysm problems, if you look at what's been added since then (4.0), is:
-Pet Battles, Scenarios, Raid Finder, Daily quest reputations, Item Upgrades, The Tillers farm (and how you can use it for Cooking), Brawlers Guild, Black Market Auction House, World Bosses.

It's just not objective to go and argue that everything that's been added it's dailies.

And saying that LFR is so easy it is not when you need ilvl463 to get in the first one. so you need to do dailys to get gear that gets you up to the ilvl or ofc buy gear at 20-30k gold a piece.
So just leave the topic.
LFR requires you to have ilvl460, which you can get by completing all the Dread Wastes quests, some Townlong Steppes rewards, and if you're still lacking gear for some reason: heroics/scenarios. You don't need to dailies to get in.

The problem with dailies is their structure. If you missed one set of dailies for whatever reason, then suddenly you're a behind. Your goal is a day further away from you and there's nothing you can do. This easily starts to mount up and it can eventually get to the point where you have missed so much rep that you just give in, because even though you're just seven days from exalted, you've still got to do the same old dailies that you've been doing for the past few months and it gets boring.
This isn't really true though. If you're 7 days away from reaching exalted, and you miss one day of dailies, you won't be at 8 days from exalted, you'll remain at 7. You're not losing anything. It's just up to you if you want to finish those 7 days in a single week, once every week, once every month...

Sure, I can see how people who had only one character would be bored by the Cataclysm model, contrary to people with many alts. But the MoP model of content is going way too much in the other direction, with alts being heavily discouraged by all the chores Blizz is pushing on us.

And it would really be to the good for the dialogue between fans and developers, if the Blizz reps here would stop being deliberately obtuse. "But you don't have to do all of this!" is not a valid comment in a game which relies so heavily on keeping players in the progression spiral ( with casuals like me being at the very low end of progression, but still feeling the need to make their character(s) better ).
When there's so much content to do with your main, do you truly need an army of alts at the same level your main is right now? at this very moment? I can't quite wrap my head around the argument of being a casual and at the same time arguing you need to have a bunch of alts at the very same level your main is.

No, we are not forced to do these dailies to be able to casually raid, however, it's damn hard to know that you have potential rewards within reach limited only by time-input, no actual effort aside from the time spent, and say 'Oh well, we got our behinds handed to us by this enrage, but it's ok, we're not as commited as those other guys doing dailies, so we'll just be content wiping since we don't have time (or even want) to do those daily quests.
Unless you're at your maximum skill level you're going to get a much bigger return from working on how well you play your character than picking a new item for him. Unless you're just massively undergeared (which you can fix by getting gear from an ample pool that is just not limited to dailies).

However, there are tons of things to discover in Mists if you go out and explore. The devs has places all sorts of cool and interesting treasures out in the world. I've had some great times just flying and riding around in Pandaria exploring.
So true.

Sure go ahead and lie but please try not to make it that obvious.
If you find them useful and enjoyable, you must be flying around in orgrimmar/stormwind waiting for something to happen because that's the only thing i know is worse than questing.
And how dare you defend the content??? We both know it's crap and the one who created it deserves to hear it.

Sorry but you can't call me a liar because you don't like my opinion. If you don't like questing, that's all fine (in fact, there's plenty of players out there that don't like having to level when a new expansion is launched), but you can't pretend your opinion is an universal, undisputable truth and everyone else is just a liar. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Patch 5.2 Release Date
More interestingly, what do you think would be a good date to launch 5.2?

Do you think the majority of players are already “finished” with the current content? Where do you think most players stand in terms of PvE and PvP progress right now?
What rules do you think we should follow when deciding to launch new content?
Should it be a fixed linear time cycle? (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Players Leaving DungeonsGetting a 30 min deserter debuff doesn't stop them, what makes you think they wont just AFK or teleport out of the dungeon instead?

Which means you will be stuck for 5 min, without a tank and no chance of replacing him.
This sums it up pretty well. Bottom line is we can’t force players to do things they don’t want to do, and why would we want to do that anyway? It’s a game; you should only do what entertains you.

Before anyone changes the topic to “yeah but we’re forced to do dailies”, I do understand that the game sometimes requires players to do things that they might not enjoy so much in order to be able to reach some things that they do.

Ideally I would like to see every aspect of the game to be as entertaining as possible to every single player, but there are 2 problems with that:

- One, everyone is different, different tastes turn this into an impossible task.
- Second, whenever you create different types of content, there will be people that will choose the content that seems to follow the path of least resistance towards an objective (example: gear).

So if you have two paths to gear, one fun, one tedious, if tedious is somewhat faster or easier than the fun path, some people will still take that route even if it goes completely against their preferences.

The trick here would be to make every kind of content that shares a similar objective to take the exact same amount of time and effort, now, not only that is highly utopic as sometimes players like the objective but don’t like the path, so they will take that path anyway to reach the objective that they do enjoy. The only solution to that would be something highly uninteresting and dull, which is make every path present the player with a choice from all the objectives that exist. But then everyone would only play and experience a very small portion of the game.

Personal experience: memorable things almost never derive from something that is fast and easy. That’s why players have so fond memories of vanilla, it took them ages to get gear from something like Naxx, and that in return, brings us feeling of value and worth to those moments, but I remember very clearly how frustrating it was for some players to be wiping for weeks/months and farm mats/gold for consumables for several hours every single day.

I’m sure that wasn’t the most entertaining experience for a lot of people, but it was for others. That allowed them to reach the objective they wanted, which was to kill an extremely hard boss and get his precious loot.

The game is always evolving and we keep trying to make the “paths” as entertaining as they can possibly be, but I don’t think there is a design that will fit with every single player’s tastes. For example, there are some that actually enjoyed that nonstop farming and wiping even then, and this is not just due to nostalgia, they did enjoy it during that time.

Game Update 1.7: Return of the Gree is coming soon to The Old Republic™, allowing players to experience brand new in-game content, including a limited time event and an exciting new way to progress your character.

Explore the Planet Ilum to unveil a new Event, Relics of the Gree! A mysterious ancient Gree starship called “the Gray Secant” has appeared over Ilum’s Western Ice Shelf. Those who are brave enough will get the chance to help the Gree and face off against a powerful foe waiting in the heart of the Gree vessel. Republic and Imperial forces that finish this mission will earn exclusive Gree technology, including highly advanced weapon and armor appearances!

Advance your character with the new Galactic Reputation system! The Galactic Reputation system lets you earn Reputation points by completing missions for factions such as the Gree or the Voss, or for military divisions within the Republic and the Empire. This new system advances characters through six ranks of increasing prestige: “Outsider”, "Newcomer", "Friend", "Hero", "Champion", and "Legend". Galactic Reputation is also tied to a character’s Legacy, so Reputation points and ranks are shared across all the characters within the same Legacy!

I tend to post primarily in Recent Forum Posts from the main page.
If I don't reply back to you in a thread, don't get overly offended as it is solely a consequence of my laziness and not out of spite.